December 8th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, .NET, VS 2008

Several people have pinged me asking for the download location of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview. We were hoping to post it on the web Friday, but unfortunately found a late bug that we felt needed to be fixed. The team is working this weekend to sign off on the new build. We hope to be able to post it as soon as this is done – apologies for the delay.

Taking an ASP.NET Application Offline: Scott Mitchell has a good article on 4GuysFromRolla that discusses a few approaches you can use to temporarily take down ASP.NET applications for updates/maintenance.

ASP.NET MVC

TDD and Dependency Injection with ASP.NET MVC: Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team writes about how to use TDD (test driven development) with the new ASP.NET MVC Framework. He uses StructureMap and RhinoMocks to enable the Dependency Injection and Mocking support.

.NET

Hidden Gems in Visual Basic 2008: Amanda Silver from the VB team has an awesome postthat discusses some of the new hidden gems with Visual Basic in VS 2008. I actually learned a few of them for the first time reading her article! Highly recommended reading.

LINQ to Active Directory is Here: Bart De Smet from my team has been working on a cool LINQ to Active Directory provider (previously called LINQ to LDAP) in his spare time. You can learn how to use it in his series here, as well as read about how he built it (and learn a lot about how to build LINQ providers).